TE22 Potpourri

Heidi Amsinck

My Name Is Jensen

Chapter 6

Danish hack?’ she had said, half cut and slurring at the end of the evening. The people at the neighbouring tables had stared, perhaps taking the two of them to be mother and daughter. You would have to be blind to think they had emerged from the same gene pool, but then Margrethe had been acting with unusual familiarity and protectiveness that evening. With the candlelight reflecting in the restaurant’s mirror surfaces, she had painted a picture of opportunity and rediscovery, but in reality, Copenhagen had only made Jensen fonder of London. Back here she felt like a stranger. In London, everyone was. The city was big enough to hide in, to reinvent herself over and over. After being dismissed fromMargrethe’s office, she had spent an unproductive afternoon googling homelessness in Denmark. Rough sleeperswereestimated to be in the hundreds in thepast year, and a good proportion of the homeless were foreigners. Henrik had been right: the man might not have been able to get a bed for the night anywhere, as hostel facilities had been cut back. She checked her phone. Henrik hadn’t been in touch. Maybe he had no information yet, maybe he was still smarting from their exchange in Magstræde, but it was not that which had stopped her from writing as much as a single sentence of her article.

Tuesday 16:04

With her legs folded at forty-fivedegrees, therewas just enough space for Jensen to perch on the dormer windowsill in her office.She stayed there as dusk fell over the red-tiled roofs of the city and crept into every corner of the room. The sky was the colour of tin, pregnant with more snow. Most of her colleagues worked on the open-plan floor downstairs, without fixed seats, keeping their laptops and belongings in tiny lockers. She was one of a lucky handful who had their own offices on the unmodernised top floor of the building; yet another reason for her colleagues to hold her in contempt, as if taking someone else’s job and gadding about under Margrethe’s protection (as long as it lasted) wasn’t enough. Though whoever had made the decision to let her have her private space had probably done everyone a favour. Fifteen years of working in London by herself had not exactly honed her skills at rubbing along. Easy to see now that moving home had been a huge mistake. Margrethe had talked her into it over dinner and copious quantities of wine at an expensive Mayfair restaurant, a rare gesture of generosity intended to soften the blow of her job as Dagbladet’s London correspondent being axed. ‘What good would you be to anyone here – an uneducated 170

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